Articles

Along with being a vehicle for announcing important company developments, online news releases can also be a powerful tool to help B2B companies dramatically increase incoming customer inquiries, fresh leads, and new sales opportunities. They can also energize offline sales, activate old or uninterested prospects, and stimulate the beginning stages of buyer’s journeys from new customers.
Here’s how to do it:

At the same time that businesses embrace technology that allows them to connect wirelessly, sell remotely and send marketing content automatically to prospects based on expressed interests, many of them also continue to cling to the timeless tactic of trade show marketing.

I have always tried to avoid writing the formulaic editor’s note that inventories the content of the issue and tells readers how entertaining and educational it all is. But as I read through this issue’s pages before we went to press, what struck me most is how entertaining and educational the content is.

Salespeople need to establish competency, but social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson says in their rush to do so, they may unwittingly be shooting themselves in the foot. The author of “No One Understands You and What to Do About It” lays out a better path to successful conversations.

Shifts in the business-to-business buying process have transformed selling as we know it. In the past, salespeople had a fair amount of control. They were given a territory, a pricing structure, a margin target and a set of products and services they could offer, and then sent off into the wild blue yonder. They were responsible for managing their territory and producing results. Sales management provided oversight, facilitated requests back to corporate to ensure that orders were expedited, and generally stayed out of the way, unless additional support was needed to help underperformers.

Few of the salespeople on your team aim for mediocrity. Most dream of reaching the top of their field. But top performers do much more than dream. They develop a series of realistic goals that propel them from where they are now to where they want to be. Next, they continue raising the bar, setting increasingly ambitious goals until they achieve their ultimate vision of success. In every case, this process begins with a realistic self-assessment.

In just the last few years, sales enablement has been evolving from a disparate set of informal activities into a centralized, strategic corporate function — complete with dedicated resources and budgetary line-items to prove it. According to SiriusDecisions, companies are now spending more than ever to increase the effectiveness of their sales force, with sales enablement budgets doubling to more than $2.4 million in the last two years, and sales enablement technology spend increasing 69 percent over the same period.

National Salesperson Day is the first Friday in March. To honor hard-working sales reps everywhere, Brainshark, Inc., a company delivering content-driven sales enablement solutions that close more deals, has gathered tips from top-performing reps on best practices that can help raise the bar for sales performance and turn “B” and “C” reps into “A” players.

I think the greatest challenge we face in the learning & development (L&D) world is whether the audience we design and deliver content for actually use the learning in the field. In my experience the content is generally good, and improves year after year. Trends such as mobile technology and gamification can extend the life of a learning initiative, increasing the impact that L&D budgets have on their target audience. Even with new delivery methods for learning design, are you certain that your people are applying the content? Who knows?

At a recent conference, I noticed an industry shift that is about to become a movement: Some Value-Added Resellers (VARs) are choosing to become a new breed of “consultants.” These born-in-the-cloud progenies have shifted allegiance from the vendor with the highest sales incentive program to the end-user client who is willing to pay for their unbiased expertise. This simple shift in the reseller’s role is going to change the future of channel incentives for these VARs.

While it is commonly understood that physically sending an item out of the country is an export transaction, under U.S. export controls laws the actual scope of what constitutes an “export” is much broader. The effects of this broad concept of exporting upon businesses – including their sales and marketing activities – are significant.

Most likely, what your boss, peers and team members expect you to do is exactly the opposite of what you need to do to be truly successful in your role. And, even more harmful, if it’s what others expect from you, it’s likely what you expect from yourself.
When you signed up for this job, you were told that you were in charge of the sales results for your company. The variables that you use to achieve those results are known as the 9 Ps of marketing.

There’s a reason why 30 percent of American companies are spending upward of $10 million on apps and mobile web this year, according to the Adobe Mobile Marketing Survey. Deals aren’t going down exactly like they used to, and while an effective sales rep still needs to make interpersonal connections to win a prospect’s trust and inspire purchases and contracts, even the most gifted sales team won’t be able to reach KPIs without adopting the new way of closing deals.

Every so often, in our attempt to align and find common ground with an individual, we unknowingly take over the conversation. Think of the last time you were in a discussion about a vacation destination. As the other person told you about his trip to a place that you also had visited, did you become eager to share your story too? It is okay in a social setting, but not in the world of sales.

Sales teams are the lifeblood of every organization as they are tasked with acquiring market share and growing revenues and profits. Ensuring that sales teams are equipped with the right sales content and tools, at the right time and location, is critical in order to realize the highest yield out of a sales opportunity pipeline in the shortest period of time. As the use of mobile devices by sales teams continues to increase, organizations are finding that they are improving sales engagement at the point of customer/prospect conversation.

The right time to expand internationally is before your sales in local markets start to flatten. International expansion should be viewed as a pre-emptive strategy and not as a maneuver of last resort.

Are you in sales? If so, are you the one making commitments or is it the buyer?
Who should be making commitments in the sales process?
If you already follow a sales process you may know the right answer to this question. Or you may be very surprised – without commitments and a sales process, you are not in control. In fact, you’re very much out of control.

Spreadsheets have been around for hundreds of years. Pre-dating the electronic spreadsheet made popular by Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel in the 80s and 90s, spreadsheets were a computerized program used to summarize information from many sources in one place and present the information in a format to help a decision maker see the financial “big picture” for a company.

So, do you want to live your life like a boss, calling the shots and living on top? Consider living life like a boss. We’ve taken six top tips from the business world that can improve your personal life too.

If you pursue the deals that make sense, do everything right in the selling and negotiating process, and deliver the promised value to the client, then winning is wonderful. But what happens when one of these three components is neglected? Each has margin erosion and unhappy clients lurking at every step so let’s look closer to understand the potential problems and how to avoid catastrophe.

The Curse of Knowledge has several manifestations but the one most relevant to sales and marketing people is that becoming steeped in a technical domain causes us to stop recognizing when we use words or ideas less familiar to others. If we are any good at our job, we immerse ourselves in learning about our industry, including what analysts say about it. The best people pretty quickly become experts.

The concept of Big Data" has sales and marketing executives abuzz over its potential, but the approach to date has been inadequate. Earlier Big Data strategies and tools have focused on collecting as much data as possible, and shaking it all up in hopes that something useful would fall out. In that sense, the term "Big Data" is perhaps less useful than would be the term "right data."